October 2011 Schedule

Holy moley, September disappeared quickly! Here's October (yes, I know we did the first one already, that's just how my schedule goes sometimes): Code Camp New York City, October 1 My second trip to The Big Apple this year, and it was great to see old friends again and make new ones. I presented two talks, thanks to everyone who attended my sessions! You attendees were awesome in both sessions, a lot of great questions and discussion in both, thank you sincerely for participating.

Is Azure Right for My Applications? What is Microsoft Azure? Is Azure right for my applications? Do I have to use .NET, or can I develop in PHP or Java? What level of calculus do I need to figure out the billing? These questions and more answered by an experienced enterprise developer and co-author of “Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development” from Packt Publishing. In this talk, we'll look at the features of Azure, how they can be used together or individually, and we'll examine the libraries and tools useful in building, debugging and managing applications on the Azure platform. We’ll also examine some of the changes to the roles of developer, administrator and DBA in a move to Azure. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of the services available in Azure, how to get started developing for Azure, useful tools to use, and how to decide if Azure is right for your applications.

Technically this second talk was a lunchtime vendor session, but Chris Bannon's Charting in Windows 8 with Wijmo post inspired me to try something new and cool. We took his post, modified an MVC application and made a talk out of it. In a week.

Building Windows 8 Applications with HTML 5 and jQuery One of the many new advances in Windows 8 is the ability to create Windows applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this session, we'll take a look at the Windows 8 technology stack on which these applications run, how HTML/CSS/JS apps actually run, and discuss the implications of the different ways to utilize third party libraries such as jQuery. We'll then migrate an MVC application which utilizes jQuery into a Metro-style application. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid idea of what it means to have a Metro-style application built with web technologies.

Houston TechFest, October 15 My second trip to Houston this year, but last time was way too short, so I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of new people this time. I'm presenting three (whew!) talks:

Rocking WebForms with jQuery Reports of WebForms' demise are very premature; in fact, WebForms still rock! And by adding just a little jQuery UI magic, they can rock even more. Whether you're beginning a new WebForms application, or maintaining an existing one, it's very easy to add a little UI razzle-dazzle that can both make your code cleaner and the application more user friendly. In this session, we'll look at what jQuery is, how to use it in ASP.NET WebForms applications, and what it can do for our WebForms applications. If you've used the ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit in your applications, you'll want to see what is replacing it. Adding Geocoded Information to Your Applications Nearly all of our important data has some sort of geographic component to it. Customers have addresses, stores are grouped into regions, and trucks follow known paths. Whether we're building the next great social site or routing truck drivers, we need a way to translate the human usable address information into latitude and longitude, which can be consumed by machines. This process is known as geocoding, and fortunately all we need to do is call an API to make this happen. SQL Server even has a special data type for storing our geographic data. In this session, we'll review several of the more popular geocoding APIs, and how to store the data in SQL Server. We'll then create a simple application to consume the API, display and store the data. By the end of this session, you'll be ready to begin adding geocoding to your own applications! Using ASP.NET Authentication in Silverlight Applications It's a fair bet that most applications require a membership repository of some sort. With .NET 2.0, Microsoft shipped the ASP.NET Authentication Provider, which made it very easy to add a full-featured membership repository to ASP.NET applications. This same authentication provider can be used in Silverlight applications without a lot of work. New project templates released with Silverlight 4 and RIA Services make this provider even easier to work with. In this session, we'll review the capabilities of this provider and see how we implement and extend it with Silverlight applications.

VS Live Redmond, October 17-21 My first ever trip to Redmond, and I'm just an attendee at this one! Fun! And heckling Rachel Appel! I'll probably have a ton of swag in my backpack, so if you see me don't be shy, my spine will thank you. Be sure to sport the snazzy t-shirt during the week, too, the sponsor is awesome! ComponentOne's Tech Connection Live, October 26 Live, from Minneapolis, it's Tech Connection Live! (I'm still coasting on that NYC buzz apparently) The Tech Connection is our bimonthly newsletter, and we here at ComponentOne are bringing a live event to the Twin Cities at the end of this month featuring jQuery, XAML and barbecue. The speaker lineup is awesome--Mike Hostetler, CEO of appendTo, Craig Berntson, Microsoft MVP and Chief Software Gardener at Mojo Software, our own Greg Lutz, and myself. I'm tweaking my experimental talk from earlier this month, and presenting it again:

Building Windows 8 Applications with HTML 5 and jQuery One of the many new advances in Windows 8 is the ability to create Windows applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this session, we'll take a look at the Windows 8 technology stack on which these applications run, how HTML/CSS/JS apps actually run, and discuss the implications of the different ways to utilize third party libraries such as jQuery. We'll then migrate an MVC application which utilizes jQuery into a Metro-style application. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid idea of what it means to have a Metro-style application built with web technologies.

Tech Connection Live is free, but space is limited, so reserve your seat soon and we'll see you in a few weeks!